


01001001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101

by Draikinator



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Drabble, M/M, Second Person, Unrequited Love, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:29:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3681513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draikinator/pseuds/Draikinator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How to say "I Love You" in Soundwave: you don't.</p>
            </blockquote>





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The flames reach up and lick the sky, warm tendrils that are far too familiar to you now in this late hour of a war you should have won. The echo of battle has left this place, leaving nought but the quiet pinging of super heated metal and burning energon.

The scent and sound of failure.

* * *

 

You were not always a gladiator. Before this your life was quieter, the empty chrome rooms of a communications expert, the digital pings of incoming transmissions and the simple, pleasant distraction of sorting files and encoding software.

Then you asked the wrong question, spoke to the wrong person, you can’t even be certain. All you know is you stepped outside of your circle and that was the end of quiet chrome and simple sorting, and the beginning of death and fire and spilled energon.

It was when you learned that you were better at more than computing, that killing was within your function. That you were good at it.

You tore your way through every tragedy they threw in with you, every empty-opticced sob story who stepped before you and bared their spark. You plowed through them like soft earth, like they weren’t even there, until him.

He stood up and when you came at him, he took you down. You thought he would kill you, the way he killed the rest if his opponents, the way you killed yours, but he didn’t. He looked down at you, covered in energon, HUD flashing critical warnings, visor crumpled and cracked, spread out like you were expecting death’s embrace from the energon slick arena floor, and he asked if you wanted to die.

You said no.

And that was it. He walked away.

* * *

You feel nothing.

You tell yourself this, over and over, in the shadowzone, your servos useless against the databanks, unfeeling, untouching, unreal.

You feel nothing.

You recalculate the trajectory coordinates again, doublechecking the calibrations on the quantum fluctuators of the space bridge, and reactivate the program.

Nothing.

This is the fifth time you have have tried and failed to escape the shadowzone. You have tried four times previous because, whether Megatron is truly dead or not, his ideals live on and until your spark finally gives out, you will fight to uphold them.

For him. Always for him.

Everything for him.

* * *

You are on a mission when you first realize that you love him. You are spinning through a herald of lazer blasts, a tumultuous explosion of light and heat that threatens to decimate your fragile form, but you are skilled and you flit through the falters in fire and smash into an Autobot, quickly and cleanly removing his head from his shoulders and reaching through the newly created hole to crush his spark in your bare servo.

It is as you are pushing off of his corpse, lifting back into the air that you see him, in the battlefield, leading the assault. There is a wounded Decepticon beneath his arm, leaking energon but protected by the massive structure of his appropriated pig-metal grey miner’s armour, and an Autobot’s arm in his other servo. He’s tearing through their forces even faster than you are, accepting their lazerfire into the thick srmour of his chassis whereas you are dancing through the skies, uninjured, and you think that they way the fire reflects from his tarnished plating is beautiful, that the way he is snarling out the rage of a million murdered miners at the unfeeling Autobots is beyond admirable, that the way he is carrying his troops through the battlefield, unafraid to die because he cannot, not yet, not until he, you, all of you, are free.

You alter your trajectory and the arc of your descent spirals into an Autobot aiming a plasma rifle at him and he smiles at you as you stand, a blast through one arm hindering but not obliterating your ability to transform, and through the haze of smoke and the cracked glass of your visor, the glittering blue energon gumming up the corners of your mask, you think that he is at his most exquisite like this, surrounded by fire snd the future, but trust, pure trust, reserved only for you, in his optics.

You love him.

* * *

You are standing in fire and death.

You have failed.

The valley is a pit of steaming steel corpses, the scent of burning energon still lingering in the air, though you estimate the stores within their bodies must have burnt through by now entirely.

You are the only one here that still has life within them, and that’s your fault. The operation would have been perfect if you had just done your job. If you had followed instructions, if you had met your perimeters, this unit would still function.

This is your fault. You have failed the Decepticons, you have failed your Unit, you have failed yourself. You have failed him.

You access your internal processor.

* * *

You let his touch linger on you, longer than you should, a servo on your shoulder, warm metal claws against the soft purple mesh beneath your plating. He says you are he most skilled warrior in his army, the most loyal, that without you, the Decepticon cause would have never taken root, taken flight, taken form.

His words fill you with light and warmth the way energon does not, and you wish he would move his servo to your face, you wish he would ask you to remove your visor, to let him see you, but he would never request you give him anything not freely offered. He has never so much as raised his voice at you, since the day he stood above you in the arena.

You consider telling him how beautiful he is beneath a hail of bullets or how perfect the growling sound of his vocoder is, low end, echoing, booming, exquisite, but you don’t, and he tells you you are heading out, that this mission needs to be followed to the letter. Your unit is important, holding down an Autobot unit while he destroys the Prime.

You update your mission perimeters and prepare to die, as you do every day.

* * *

You tell him every day how much you love him, but not with your voice. Only once in your life has he asked you to speak with the same words and way as him, to ask if you wanted to die.

You tell him you love him in the way you shoot Autobot scouts, single shot, through the spark, without taking your root mode, without dropping from the air and your position. You tell him you love him in the way you prepare your reports, spying on Autobot assault units, without recharge, exhausted and overclocking late into the dark hours, the local star hidden behind the mass of your planet.

You tell him you love him in the way you let yourself take bullets you could avoid to make a shot you needed to make, unafraid and unhindered by a preoccupation with avoiding death.

You tell him you love him every time you kill an enemy, every time you sneak into Autobot territory, every time you drag an injured Decepticon back to your base, every time you carry yourself past the fear of death and into the promise of his future.

You speak in the words you know, in blood and death and fire. You tell him you love him in the only way you can and hope he understands.

* * *

He is losing.

Your unit needs you, under constant fire and in need of your direction, but he is losing.

He is strong, but not enough, and the Prime is overwhelming him. The Prime will win, and he will kill him.

You abandon your unit when he slips, leg fracturing beneath him against the blow of the Prime’s hammer, and you smash into the Prime, screaming. You dig into him again and again, ripping at plating, tearing at seams. Everything is chaos and fire and energon until you are ripped backward, frenzied and shrieking.

It’s him.

The Prime retreats with his people. Your people are gone. Empty shells literally the landscape, buried in piles of each other, Decepticon and Autobot alike, but mostly Decepticon.

He is screaming. The Prime is his, and his alone. This war must be won, with or without him, the war must be won even at the cost of his life.

He leaves you in the valley to regroup and you stand among smoking corpses and your regrets. You love him, and you have failed him.

You say I Love You with the only words you have left to you. You open your BIOS menu, and delete your emotions.


End file.
